ReviewTrying your hand at skateboarding without falling on your bum or grazing your knees is now possible, all thanks to a videogame. Based on pro-skateboarder Tony Hawk it has been developed to allow you to perform virtual ollies, grinds and flip tricks using a wireless skateboard peripheral.

Online shopping customers who send back goods straight away must not be charged for their delivery, Europe's top court has said. Consumers can be required to pay the cost of returning the goods but should be refunded every other cost, it said.

UpdateUK air-traffic authorities have confirmed that flights will remain grounded until at least the early hours of Saturday morning as dangerous ash clouds from an Icelandic volcano continue to blanket the nation.

WorkshopChanges to the IT environment are the source of some of the biggest headaches for the IT pro. They probably always will be, for the obvious reason that accidents aside, the most straightforward way of destabilising an IT system is to change it.

President Barack Obama yesterday insisted that US astronauts will reach Mars by the mid-2030s, during a speech in which he stressed "nobody is more committed to manned spaceflight, to human exploration of space than I am".

PicThe ESA has released this pic of the Icelandic volcano plume currently paralyzing air traffic above northern Europe and Britain. The pic was snapped yesterday by the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer instrument aboard the Envisat spacecraft, before the plume had spread to cover the southern UK.

A UN think tank has revealed that almost half of India's 1.2 billion population has access to that most basic of human needs - a mobile phone - although a good proportion of them will not be using it while sitting on the toilet.

CommentThe obsession of the media and political worlds with pointless info-toys met a new nadir last night, during the webby part of Newsnight's otherwise respectable coverage of the first Prime Ministerial debate.

Planet-friendly pigfarm barons in Missouri have come up with a brilliant new plan for disposing of their porcine portfolios' pungent poo output. They have developed a process which turns pigshit into road tarmac.

VidsEl Reg's Paper Aircraft Released into Space (PARIS) team has been busy acquiring some toys for our world-beating attempt to boldly put the Vulture 1 paper plane where no paper plane has ever been put before.

Reader Mini-PollCloud computing is one of the most talked about topics in the industry at the moment. One of the difficulties, however, is that it is sometimes hard to work out exactly what people mean by it. Different vendors and service providers use the term in relation to some quite different types of offering. Various well-meaning commentators and institutions have then tried to define cloud with a view to creating more clarity, but their different explanations have often just added to the confusion.

Thirsty astronauts orbiting the Earth aboard the International Space Station (ISS) have just gained a handy new source of water to eke out supplies shipped up from Earth and those from the station's famously erratic urine recycling system.

ReviewIn a world constantly upgrading and adding new innovative features to tempt users into buying a new piece of gear; it is truly refreshing to come across a product that not only raises the bar on quality, but reuses old camera systems - giving them a new lease of life. The CFV-39 digital back is something of a revelation, because it works with a series of medium format Hasselblad film cameras dating back to 1957 and brings them bang up-to-date capturing images at a resolution of 39Mp.

Oracle's software strategy as it takes on application software industry leader SAP is to not only work on its own systems, thanks to its $7.4bn acquisition of Sun Microsystems, but to beat SAP at having software packages aimed at very precise customer sets.

A suburban Philadelphia school district secretly captured thousands of images of students in their homes, sometimes as they slept or were partially undressed, according to documents filed in federal court.